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Tracking down CSS icon problems

We recently noticed a strange effect upon our web site, when we implemented a new component which was making use of the Joomla Searchtools and the JHtml 'jgrid.published' method upon the front end.  The basic problem was that the methods which use various icons such as icon-search, icon-publish icon-unpublish etc. was not displaying the icons and instead all we were observing was a small square rectangle where the icon should have been shown.

It was apparent that it had to be a site template ‘feature’ since when using the Joomla Protostar template all icons were correctly displayed.

We have made use of a Bootstrap 3 based template for some time and not observed this effect before, which is probably because we had not tried to use these Joomla methods before in the site front end.

Using the Firefox Web Developer plugin, we could see the CSS that was generated, and we could try and edit the CSS until we could achieve  the desired result, which was obviously to see the icons. What puzzled us for a little while was why after adding what we thought were the correct CSS commands the screen display (Firefox) didn’t immediately show the icon specified, and instead displayed a small lined box icon.  This made us immediately think that we had the wrong code, but after adding the same codes to the actual template and refreshing the page, clearing the cache etc., the requested icons did indeed appear.  Whether this is a Web Developer feature is unclear but it was certainly misleading!

The Bootstrap 3 template makes use of Awesome Fonts and it appears that something or somehow the font family has been disassociated from the icon class, so we added a few additional CSS rules to the template and this resolved the problem.

.icon-publish:before, .icon-save:before, .icon-ok:before, .icon-checkmark:before {
font-family: FontAwesome; content: "\f00c";
}
.icon-unpublish:before, .icon-cancel:before {
font-family: FontAwesome; content: "\f00d";
}
.icon-trash:before { font-family: FontAwesome; content: "\f1f8"; }
.icon-search:before { font-family: FontAwesome;    content: "\f002"; }
.icon-archive:before { font-family: FontAwesome;    content: "\f187"; }

The above FontAwesome content codes are for the 4.4.0 release.

Whilst investigating this we also looked at a problem that we has observed some time ago but never resolved, which was that the small drop down that we present on some pages which contains the icons to Print or Email the page contents, was difficult to see, and only upon hovering with the mouse over the small box where the dropdown was positioned, actually revealed its presence.  We wished the presence of the box to be more visually evident.

Again Firefox Web Development Tools helped and we could see that the dropdown CSS code was effectively empty so we had to specify a background colour as below:

a.btn.dropdown-toggle
{
background-color: #99ccff; 
}

This added a nice light blue colour to our background and achieved what we desired.

We are still a little puzzled as to why the above was required, but suspect that the reason is that Joomla itself has implemented specific changes to its own Bootstrap 2 implementation as used by the Protostar template, as since we were/are using a template based upon Bootstrap 3 we need to add these additional CSS codes to ensure functionality is maintained. This tends to support our conclusion from an earlier problem with the use of vertical tabs, which are not supported in Bootstrap 3, but that is a different post topic completely!

Rialto v1.2.0 released
Kbase 1.1.0 released.
 
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